“... he was not. And the epiphany in Cologne Cathedral in 1938, his reaction to a portrait of the Madonna behind the high altar, didn’t happen either. This transformative moment seems to have been borrowed from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. These are the recollections of an older man trying to give meaning to his life and work. They do however represent a kind ...”

“... It’s not immediately obvious that she smiles with love for her daughter (unlike, say, the toothy Madonna in Joos van Cleve’s Virgin and Child who glows with affection as she presses her breast to her son’s mouth). The artist gazes straight out of the picture but not in the conventional fashion: she is looking at something, and her daughter has turned to ...”

“... Ambrosio’s cell with fatal ease. Matilda’s ‘exquisite’ face mirrors the painting of the Madonna that Ambrosio formerly worshipped, so that his pious adoration of the Virgin is transformed into lust for a demon. No wonder Lewis’s contemporaries were taken aback. Anti-Catholic polemic was common in the late 18th century, but it had not previously ...”

“... curtains. The country was awash with milk. Kitchens and bedrooms were hung with pictures of the Madonna and Child. After the arrival of infant formula in the 1950s, breastfeeding became more of a chosen, middle-class activity, but it was still common in the countryside, and was everywhere practised as a fairly optimistic form of contraception. Still, though ...”

“... his books and entertains his tempestuous mistress, Gloria, the perfect Magdalene to Cressida’s Madonna: sexy, liberated, dabbling in modelling and acting and writing. He seesaws between the two, comfortable in his masculine prerogative, but vaguely aware that he is making no one happy. Only Cressida’s neighbour Mrs Butterhorn (widowed, so more ...”

“... women, according to Dr McLynn’s casebook, was that old and familiar one of seeing them as either madonna or whore. His ‘profound ambivalence’ meant that while he might ostensibly be courting Virginia Ambella – or Katie Gough-Roberts, or Alice Pike or even, first time around, Dorothy Tennant (who later married him) – what he was unconsciously courting ...”

“... musings, even for comic purposes. An American art critic featured on a recent TV documentary about Madonna and her eclectic borrowings puts this sort of stuff in context: ‘We are invited to call it post-modernism,’ was his deadpan verdict, ‘but I prefer to call it shopping.’ Sheldrake is one of the bit-part players in Lodge’s satirical tableau of the ...”

“... become a hacker, or to copy hacker slang: you will be merely a wannabe. That term is borrowed from Madonna fans; other hacker slang comes from mathematicians; and quite a lot – including the general mind-set – is shared with SF fandom: for example, IMHO, meaning ‘in my humble opinion’, and ha ha only serious, which is self-explanatory. True hacker ...”

“... are ours; Her genius and her glory are her own. Like a contemporary cultural theorist musing over Madonna, Arnold takes hold of the dead actress and refashions her as a cultural icon. In doing so, like Eliot and James but unlike Charlotte Brontë, he makes Rachel’s fame inseparable from her Jewishness. The manner of her death and burial makes it plain that ...”

“... of victims sometimes corresponds, in function, to Catholic iconography: the representation of the Madonna with the dead Christ is known as a Pietà because it is intended to evoke pity. That key work of compassionate representation, the Grünewald Altarpiece in Colmar, was painted for a hospital and features a Christ scored with the weals of St Elmo’s ...”

“... of invention – and it would be foolish to have expected anything less of this amazing woman, the Madonna of her day, a star in the firmament of ball-breakers. The clever, spoilt and wilful child of an illegitimate Irish beauty and a short-lived British ensign, Eliza Gilbert was shipped from India at the age of six into the care of her stepfather’s ...”

“... Jesus, Ian, what do Bernard and June do in their next adventure, invade Poland to rape the Black Madonna? ‘Yaaaggghhhh!’ I recall Ian screaming on the morning we first met at the UEA coffee bar, when the tea melted through his cheap plastic cup and spilled a second-degree burn on his thigh. I’d literally just walked into the place off the plane from ...”

“... to hate the young, but – like Private Eye – it actually sucks up to them. Freddie Mercury, Madonna, Heavy Metal and the like are given the expected dressing-down but with a knowing wink: we may be oldies but we’re not really out of touch, and nor are you. The Heavy Metal piece, for instance, could only be struggled through by someone who wanted to ...”

“... good sewer’, Ruskin wrote, was ‘a far nobler and a far holier thing … than the most admired Madonna ever painted’. The Pursuit of Power tells the story of this century extremely well. Evans gives clear and persuasive accounts of revolutions, political movements, constitutional developments, European and imperial wars and territorial changes. He also ...”

“... dieting, liposuction, breast implants and so on – while the corset itself, popularised by Madonna and beloved by the transgendered, has re-emerged as outerwear. In Bound to Please, Leigh Summers acknowledges the complexities emphasised by the revisionists, but rejects their celebratory tone. A corset-burner, she still thinks that 19th-century corsets ...”